The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), pioneered the use of quasars to map density variations in intergalactic gas at high redshifts, tracing ...

In a paper published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, MIT researchers propose an experiment that may close the last major loophole of Bell's inequality—a 50-year-old theorem that, if violated by experiments, ...

An international team led by the University of New South Wales has studied a distant star where gravity is more than 30,000 times greater than on Earth to test its controversial theory that one of the constants of Nature ...

(Phys.org)—Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have discovered a quasar with the most energetic outflow ever seen, at least five times more powerful than any that have been observed to date. Quasars are extremely ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- For the first time, astronomers have found pristine clouds of the primordial gas that formed in the first few minutes after the Big Bang. The composition of the gas matches theoretical predictions, providing ...

The biggest 3-D map of the distant universe ever made, using light from 14,000 quasars  supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies billions of light years away  has been constructed by scientists with ...

Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have discovered the first known case of a distant galaxy being magnified by ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- The combination of Hubble's powerful suite of instruments and its position far above the effects of Earth's atmosphere has consistently produced outstanding scientific results for nineteen years. This success ...